Some Like It Mild

N and I love spicy food. We are all about powerful yet flavorful spice – we don’t eat raw chilies (although I accidentally did this once in Indonesia and it was NOT pretty) and don’t like the sensation of a mouth so on fire you cannot taste anything but. However, we have been known to generously squirt sriracha into stir-fries, ladle dollops of harissa into cous cous, slather tacos with hot salsa, favor Thai green curries over their milder yellow and red cousins, and count vindaloo as a given whenever we order at Indian restaurants. We have a stockpile of chili sauces and Cajun spice blends in our kitchen so we can elevate (yes, I said ‘elevate’) homemade dishes to a fierier level.

Sadly, our new compatriots do not share our zest for, well, zest. French cuisine is marvelously tasty and rich – for crying out loud, there is actually a category of chef, the saucier, whose sole responsibility is to perfect sauces! – but there is no room in the French palate for piquancy. Even when ordering “spicy” dishes at ethnic restaurants, we eagerly anticipate the rush of fire on the tongue, only to be met with the same, disappointing, bland result again and again: a walk on the mild side. (Apologies to Lou Reed and to all of you for that.)

Surely the people’s palates have been shaped by their cuisine, one that is so ingrained and lauded that the French President has recently stated that it should be on the UNESCO World Heritage list. It’s a solid tradition that has resisted the exotic, spicy influences of its former colonies and current immigrant populations. Moreover, ethnic restaurants cater to predominantly French tastes, watering down the kick of their traditionally fiery mainstays. This was first made apparent to us many months ago, when we ate at a fabulous Thai restaurant in Belleville with some French friends. Although N and I felt our dishes were considerably mild yet highly flavorful, our friend was experiencing some difficulty with her tom kha gai. Coughing repeatedly and gulping down water like a desert nomad at an oasis, she eventually sputtered, “Trop piquante” (too spicy) and eventually regained enough composure to ask if any of us wanted to finish her soup. I took one spoonful, only to laugh a bit to myself: if this is three-alarm spice, the sirens must be on mute. On another occasion, in another Thai restaurant in the Marais, N asked for a dish to be prepared extra-spicy, only to find this “heightened” spice level barely registerable. And I swear the sriracha in this country is even watered down, because at home and in Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants I have to dump a disgusting amount of it on my food to give it some bite. Similarly, “hot” salsa at French supermarkets has the equivalent piquancy of tomato sauce. The French themselves literally water down spicy sauces. Case in point: our friends had us over for dinner and brought out “spicy sauce”—a bowl of what looked like broth but was really water with a miniscule amount of harissa mixed in. (Kind of gross, actually.) And in a bizarre twist at a café, I ordered what was labeled a panini mexicain piquante, hoping for some kick but expecting nothing, only to find that the chicken within had been “spiced” with curry. Confused, much?

There is one reliable source of spice, and that is North African cuisine. With the abundance of such eateries all over Paris, we know we count on the small bowl of harissa plonked on the table (much like a bottle of ketchup at a burger joint) to inject our tagine and cous cous with some kick. However, we seem to be in the minority of diners who actually infuse this hot chili paste into their dishes. Halfway into the main course at a Moroccan restaurant with French friends, I offered someone a taste of my beef tagine, onto which I’d liberally applied harissa. The spice level was to my liking although I forgot to warn my friend before she bit into the large spoonful of chick peas and carrots. Needless to say, she was not happy and spent the next few minutes chugging water and eating bread. Oops.

I wish I could say that I hadn’t made that mistake twice, but oh man did I ever instill fear into the stomachs of our amis. We invited a French couple over for a home-made Asian feast of sautéed noodles with beef and a veggie stir-fry. If we were cooking for ourselves, we would’ve been far more generous with the amount of chili sauce in both dishes. However, we were cooking for much milder palates and so we purposefully kept the spice-level tame. Truly. I’m talking not even a teaspoon. Unfortunately, this supposed lack of bite only came back to (proverbially) bite us in the ass. What for us registered as a whisper, a hint, an apparition of spice rendered the food, at first, excessively fiery for one of our guests, and, after a couple bites, inedible. Needless to say, we felt absolutely horrible. This is the last thing, save food poisoning, one wants to inflict upon a dinner guest. After getting plied with endless apologies and glassfuls of water, our guest was fine, but she’s probably scared to have us cook for her again.

Thankfully, we were redeemed when we had other friends over for dinner. In a conversation about New Orleans, my Australian friend (who is half-Sri Lankan and therefore has been eating chili-infused goodness practically since birth) mentioned she’s always wanted to try Cajun cuisine. This prompted a Cajun dinner chez nous, as N’s signature dish is the Cajun classic Crawfish Monica and I can whip up a zesty yet delicate blackening rub. Her French boyfriend was also invited, and so I arduously questioned her about his palate, not wanting to repeat my recent Asian menu gaffe. He allegedly had a proclivity for spice, but that’s all relative, isn’t it? We proceeded with caution, not at all shying away from the spice but not going full-tilt with it, either. In the end, the results were fantastic. Of course, they raved about the ‘Cronica’ (how could one not?) and relished the blackened chicken. Was the meal too spicy? Not a bit. He was perfectly satisfied, while she could have kicked it up a slight notch (like us other foreigners of the not-so-sensitive palates). We have finally found at least one native Frenchman who can hang with spice-slingin’ sharp-shooters in a nation of the gun-shy. The chances of this are one in a million.